Code Monkey
by unknown user
Summary: Digital Soul fanfiction, a prequel to the manga, in novel form. Chronicles the formation of J-Soft, as well as how the founding members joined. R&R onegai shimasu!
1. Chapter 1 NewBeginnings

1

To: "Tom" tom32techiemail.com 

**From: "John Yoshiro" Yoshirohakware.cjb.net**

**Subject: Idea**

**X-Mailer: sendmail **

**MIME-version: 1.0**

**Message Start**

**Hey, tom. I have an idea that could be really awesome, but it's kind of radical, so bear with me.**

**After watching Chobits for the nth time, something clicked. It all came into my brain at once, the AI, the machine vision, and the physical design. I figured out how to build a persicom. Or rather, more like a normal robot with persicom-style intelligence.**

**It involves Bayesian nets, confidence matrices, and heuristic database evaluation subroutines. I'll tell you all about it later.**

**But my idea also involved something separate from tech. If we're going to do this, we need to have a way of distributing it, and for that we need a company. Now, I understand if you're a little weary of startups due to the dot-com bubble bursting, but I'm weary of my job at PCW, and you don't have a job to begin with, so I think a startup might be good for both of us.**

**If we're going to do this, we need some funding, however. And we also need some more developers. I know you are a little short of cash after that whole ordeal with your family, but I could really use your coding skills.**

**I'll put an ad online for finding more coders. If you know anybody, ask them too. We can use all the help we can get . **

**Sincerely,**

**John**

John lied back on his office chair, the email finally finished and sent. The radio was blasting an old Police song, redone by a rapper whose friend died. Hearing the hip-hop rhythm, John instinctively shut off his stereo and called up http:di.fm in xmms, calmed by the trippy lyrical synthesizer beeps and earth-shaking bass.

He glanced across his room, seeing instantaneously in his broad sweep various signs of the inherent geek. His eyes glided past his stack of CD-R's, onward across stacks of printouts, motherboards, hard drives, and boxes upon boxes of 3 ½" floppy disks in rainbow colors. He stopped on a poster, hanging on the far wall. It was of Rene Descartes, the revolutionary Renaissance philosopher and mathematician, and it said, "I think, therefore I am." He idly considered this long-standing concept, while staring at the various spots of color used by the printer that had originally created this poster. When one looked closely, it appeared as if Monet had suddenly taken to using tiny colored pencils, and that his subject was some duke of Germany from the early 19th century. He had almost gotten used to the overwhelmingly erratic trance-techno playing in the background when his computer sputtered out "Mail received". He turned around and typed, "pine" at the command prompt. Damn Tom is fast. It's like he has it hooked up to his brain or something.

He opened up the mail, lime-green text flashing away on his xterm, exemplifying the need for a better windowing system for UNIX.

It said, simply:

**John,**

**Sure, I'm in. It's not like I have anything better to do. Hey, what are the chances that there'll be some chicks answering that ad?**

_Typical Tom, always worrying about the girlfriends he'll never get_. John corrected himself; _I shouldn't be talking since I'm not such hot stuff myself_.

He quit pine, and started up emacs. He began working on his intelligence engine code, writing source in C and inline assembler without looking at the time, although added to the time he had already been up, the total of his waking hours had been over 30 by the time he finally saved and went to bed.

Tom walked down the dimly lighted street, rain wetting his shoulder-length brown hair. He tried to focus his eyes beyond the bright neon lining the 2 lanes ahead of him, but failed. He heard a few normal urban noises; sirens, cats meowing, someone listening to jungle music a few blocks away, likely dancing like an idiot and doing some "hip" antics with his equally "hip" friends. His brain was not phased by a crash in an adjoining alley, or at least not at first. It took him a few seconds to notice that the quiet sobs he was hearing were coming from the same place as said crash. When he realized what this meant, he quickly located the source of the sound, and ran into the alley.

            At the end of the alley, kneeling in loose trash and the detritus of society's daily refuse was a girl about his age. She, like him, had shoulder length brown hair, however the similarity ended there. She was wearing a baggy nightshirt, and holding a large knife in her hand.

"Are you alright?" The girl didn't answer. Tom looked again at the position of the knife, which glinted eerily in the distant yellow light of the streetlight on the main road. He didn't know why he couldn't see it before. She was holding the knife close to her wrist, shaking with her whole body and staring off into space with blank, glassy eyes. He read the name embroidered on her lapel.

"Chihiro, huh?" The girl nodded.

"Don't do it. You look much cuter when you're alive." Tom let out a forced smirk, and Chihiro chuckled at the inappropriate joke.

"Why don't you come with me?" The girl nodded and stood up, dropping the knife and taking Tom's outstretched hand.

"Hai, moshi moshi?" John rubbed his eyes with the hand not being used to hold up the telephone.

            "John, it's Tom," came the reply.

"What the fuck, Tom. Why are you calling me this early?"

"It's noon, dude."

"Well I pulled 30 hours last night with this MI control code, so give me a break please." John's annoyance was replaced with calm apologies.

"Speaking of, dude, I've got someone to help you out." Tom's statement came to a pause as his enthusiasm came to a climax. "And it's a chick, man!"

John scratched his head and yawned. "Good for you. Can she code?"

"Yeah, man. She's pretty damn good."

"Great."

"You wouldn't believe how I found her, man. I'll tell you the whole exciting story when I bring her over later."

"Cool.  About that, I think we need to get a headquarters before my parents get too sick of me doing all my business in the house."

"Sure, I'm on it. Tom out."

"Jaa mata, Tom."

"Sayonara." John hung up the phone and turned on his desktop's CRT monitor, ready for some more coding.


	2. Chapter 2 EnterKiro

2

          John looked up from his work, his eyes bleary from looking for the unaccountable mismatches of parentheses in his lisp code. He had already coded the neural net's core, but had written also plugin support. He figured that by modularizing he could save trouble with people wanting their robots to do things; this way they could load a program instead of teaching the robot by hand.

            Unfortunately, he had chosen the wrong language for extensibility. Common Lisp, a language written expressly for the purpose of AI, was a hulk of a language, with thousands of functions built in. Not only that, but everything was enclosed in parentheses, parentheses which interact by placement, and which need to compliment each other. This would not be so bad if the language had been written modernly, with tabs and such, but as it is John could not match up the parentheses properly, nor really understand why his code was not working.

            The telephone's insistent ring woke him from his self-recursive trance, and he broke from the world of car and cons to answer it.

"Moshi moshi?" His ears nearly popped when he heard the voice on the other end: perky, high-pitched, and LOUD.

            "John-kun! This is Lina, calling back on behalf of Kiro." Happy, as usual. Some times he just couldn't stand her constant energy. This time he held back, fearing as always the reaction, unpredictable as it was though most likely complimenting the girl's sanguine persona, of breaking the bubble of complete ecstacy that seems to surround her.

            "Hai, sou desu yo. Well, I called to ask if you guys would like to help me on a project."

            "Ah, sou desu ka? What is it?" There was no doubt anymore, it wasn't just the migraine, Lina really was loud.

            John faltered, hoping that he could cop out of this annoying (and now painful) interface, moved for the card which would give him a nice soft voice, with a concise manner and some logic and intelligence. While he was thinking...

            "Did you hear me? I asked what your project was."

            He just spat it out. "Eto, can I please speak with Kiro about this?"

            "Ah, so it's _that_ kind of project..." Lina mocked.

            "No, it's not that..." He was cut off.

            "Hello, John." A soft, but gruff voice responded. John had figured that this is what would happen; either that or Lina would get mad and hang up.

            "Hi Kiro. I was going to ask you..."

            "I already know, persicom right?" Before John could ask, Kiro continued. "I have connections, any open source project is likely to pass into my mailbox if it meets the correct criteria."

            "So, will you..."

            "Sure."

            "Can you..."

            "I'll come over tomorrow at noon. That is what you wanted to ask me, ne?"

            "Hai."

            "Goodbye then." John was left with a dial tone ringing in his right ear, dumbfounded. He had always knew Kiro was smart, but not that he was a mind reader.

            Tom hated mosquitos. He also hated waiting. But most of all, he hated looking and feeling like an idiot. Unfortunately, all three evils were confronting him as he stood stupidly on John's doorstep with a case of red bull in his hand and a laptop bag hanging off his shoulder.

            He had rung the bell twice, but John had not yet woken up, apparently. Chihiro appeared behind him; she had been waiting by the car for him, but had apparently become impatient. Tom looked at Chihiro. She was wearing Tom's old clothes, and holding a bag in her left hand marked "Target" (he had taken her shopping before he came here). He did not even notice how long he had been staring at her until she looked up, apparently focusing on something behind him. He followed her eyes, and saw John grinning widely.

            "Come on in." He kept the door open for Tom, who seemed to know his way, and ushered in Chihiro also, who looked at the house in wonderment, why John did not know.

            "We'll be expecting an interview in a few minutes, make yourself at home." John eyed the clock nervously.

            "Oh, John, I brought you a little present." Tom pulled out his box of Red Bull, with the four cans of taurinated, caffinated, and overly sugared nirvana as the package recommended, slightly chilled.

            "Wow, thank you! You really know me well, don't you, anata." John winked, and Tom veered back. "Just a joke!" Tom gave a sigh of relief.

            Just then, the screech of a quickly moving car, more specifically a BMW Z3, was heard outside the house. John and Tom jolted, and again moments later when they heard the sound of trash cans clattering onto asphalt. Tom peeked through the blinds behind the couch on which he was sitting, looking in the direction of the sound.

            "Sorry for the mess! Hey John, it's Lina, open up!" Tom looked back and gave a shrug. John then started walking towards the door, but before he could reach it, Lina bursted through, exposing Kiro, kneeling and holding a hair pin. He stood up, showing the full effect of his build.

            He was tall, and reasonably muscled, although he was slim. His black hair and chiseled features made a striking contrast with his bright and inquisitive green eyes. He nodded slightly, noting that John was analyzing him, and said simply, "May I come in?"

            John paused for a moment, feeling Kiro's imposing presence, which, as always, introduced a bit of tension into the room. "Sure, come on in."

            Kiro slinked silently into the room, turning to face the space between Tom and John, and folded his hands behind his back respectfully. There was a pause.

            "So..." Tom tried to break the silence.

            Almost immediately, Kiro began to speak, his sharp intonation emphasizing his conciseness even more than one might expect. "I have reviewed your work, and I believe that it would be very unlikely at this rate that your project will fail, given that you in fact have three programmers aside from yourself working on this. However, I know that you cannot do everything through software, or even stock hardware. That is why you called me here, ne?"

            "Yes." John sounded unsure of himself.

            "I have unusual persistence, and a reasonable knowledge of digital logic gate design. Therefore, you were correct in your assumption that I would make a good consultant for your hardware design."

            Tom had a realization. "Oh."

            Kiro continued. "Because you are in such a great need, I will lend you my services for free. I only ask that I receive fifteen percent of the profits per unit shipped."

            "That sounds reasonable," John agreed.

            Kiro nodded, as if it was something that he already knew. Tom broke a red bull out of the box and handed it to Kiro. "Banzai, " Tom said as he clinked cans with John and Kiro.

            Chihiro looked around the bathroom, semiconsciously wondering if she should put on her newly bought clothing. She sat on the fuzzy toilet seat cover, feeling very awkward. She wondered what was going on in the other room. There had been some discussion before, however now it was silent. Chihiro removed her old clothing, article by article, and placed each article in the bright red plastic bag, replacing the corresponding articles she had bought. No, she thought. Tom had bought them for her.

            When she was fully dressed, she slowly opened the door and peered into the living area. She could see Tom and John slumped on the couch, and the tall man whom she did not know was in fact Tom's new coworker was sitting very rigidly in a tall brown wooden chair adjacent to the window facing outwards on the right of the couch. Tom looked up and caught her eye. He smiled, and Chihiro, caught off-guard, for some reason made a sour face at him. He veered back as she collected herself, and she shyly entered the hallway leading from the bathroom, and then the living room.

            Even Tom was surprised at the look of this new Chihiro. Her hair had been let loose out of its bun, and combed into a sort of waterfall down her shoulders, now clad in pink cotton. His eyes followed the curves down the shirt, down to the blue jean covered hips. He was so absorbed that he didn't notice his audible exclamation "pretty...", or at least not until the girl had already changed her attitude a complete 180, started dashing towards him, and whacked him in the head with her clothing bag,

            "Tom no baka!" Chihiro exclaimed.

            "Gomen ne," said Tom, rubbing his head. "What did you buy? Cast iron stilettos?"

            Chihiro faltered. No, you bought them.


End file.
